Pelosi’s daughter says speaker is telling women to ‘define yourself’
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has faced criticism from prominent Republican lawmakers and President Donald Trump for the way she has led the impeachment inquiry, but her daughter said that her mother’s actions are an attempt to tell women to “define yourself.”
“That is what she is now — telling women ‘reclaim yourself. Don’t be defined by other people’s expectations or mischaracterizations of you,’ ” Christine Pelosi said to CNN’s Brooke Baldwin on “Newsroom” Friday.
Christine Pelosi’s comments come a day after the speaker pushed back a Sinclair reporter who asked whether she hates Trump, issuing a scathing warning: “Don’t mess with me.” It was the latest in a series of moments involving Nancy Pelosi that went viral after the California Democrat fired back after being challenged.
Nancy Pelosi, who was on her way out of a weekly press conference on Thursday, returned to the podium to clarify that while she believes Trump is a “coward,” that’s only about his political positions.
“I think this President is a coward when it comes to helping our kids who are afraid of gun violence,” she said, adding, “I pray for the President all the time,” Nancy Pelosi said. “So don’t mess with me when it comes to words like that.”
In the first year of her second stint as House speaker, Nancy Pelosi has seen that interaction with a reporter and multiple contentious moments between herself and Trump go viral, often earning praise from Democrats.
In October, she redirected an attack from Trump on Twitter, turning a photo he had tweeted of her during a contentious White House meeting with the caption “Nervous Nancy’s unhinged meltdown!” into her Twitter cover shot.
Video of Nancy Pelosi sarcastically clapping at Trump during his State of the Union address in February and, just before she became speaker, a contentious moment in the Oval Office between herself and Trump also became rallying points for Democrats who saw her actions as standing up to Trump. The December 2018 meeting, just before a record-breaking government shutdown, was punctuated by Nancy Pelosi putting on her sunglasses in front of the cameras outside the White House.
Christine Pelosi said her mother hasn’t been trying to create these kinds of viral moments with her displays of character.
“One thing that has always been surprising to her is how her clear statements of conscience and fact become these memes,” she told Baldwin.
